Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. Ontologies are commonly used in fields such as artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, and knowledge management, among others.
One problem with the proliferation of ontologies (and other hierarchical relationship frameworks) is that they are often created by domain experts for a particular domain or computing application, resulting in highly specific ontologies that not very extensible to other purposes. Another deficiency commonly experienced is that ontologies are often limited in vocabulary which may result in synonyms of words in the ontology not being classified or processed correctly by the application implementing the ontology. In short, ontologies provided by the prior art are restricted to the specific words used in the ontology, meaning additional language is not supported by the ontology.